Erich Maria Remarque

He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front. He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.

From his novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, which was published in 1929.

Remarque, who grew up in a working-class family, was drafted into the German army in 1916, when he was 18.  In 1917, he was wounded by shrapnel and spent the rest of the war in a military hospital.

Remarque married American movie star Paulette Goddard -- whose three ex-husbands included Charlie Chaplin -- in 1958.  He was 60, she was 48.  

Remarque died on this date in 1970.

Erich Maria Remarque